Key Terms/Sūtra
Basic Meaning
Sūtras mainly refer to the discourses delivered by the Buddha and his disciples, and the Sūtra corpus is one of the three main sets of teachings which form the Buddhist canon.
Has the sense of
Sūtras originally referred to the aphoristic sayings and discourses, although one can find many exegetical and descriptive sūtras. In the Buddhist tradition, sūtras are generally considered to be the words of the Buddha or his immediate disciples, in contrast to the commentarial or synoptic literature, some of which summarized and condensed the teachings in the sūtras.